A Forgotten Scandal: How the Nazi Spy Case of 1938 Affected American Neutrality and German Diplomatic Opinion

A Forgotten Scandal: How the Nazi Spy Case of 1938 Affected American Neutrality and German Diplomatic Opinion Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones istorians tend to ignore the role of intelligence in Clyde Tolson, the detective had “an uncanny knack of foreign policy decision-making.1 The reason for this securing information.” Chicago special agent in charge Earl is obvious. As intelligence historians themselves Connelley said he was the “best investigator of criminal Hhave noted, presidents have tended to neglect findings violations in the bureau.”6 Yet by the end of the decade he based on secretly obtained information. Why, then, should had been fired. the foreign policy historian give intelligence more than its How did he fall so precipitously from grace? In the 1930s due?2 the FBI was, as it is today, the nation’s premier detective There is one facet of intelligence history to which agency. To have been the best detective in the best detective scholars normally do pay attention—spy scandals. agency is quite an achievement. A most singular series of The corrupt intent of French agents in the XYZ Affair events must have occurred to cause Turrou to fall out of occasioned, when exposed, a scandal favor and into historical obscurity. and a diplomatic crisis that historians Turrou’s personal history was a have by no means ignored. The scandal tangle of half-truths and lies. He was of the Zimmermann telegram helped born Leon Turovsky, in the Russian- draw the United States into World War controlled town of Kobryn, Poland, I, and it has inspired a proper measure on September 14, 1895. He gave widely of attention. In later years, historians divergent accounts of his early years. linked the Alger Hiss spy scandal He said he was not Jewish, but he with increasing tensions between the was. He said he was an orphan, but United States and the Soviet Union. he was not. He said he fought with the Such events appear not just in foreign French Foreign Legion on World War policy tomes, but also in the narratives I’s Western Front and had a shrapnel of general textbooks.3 wound to show for it. An FBI medical The Nazi spy case of 1938 was examination confirmed the wound, but also a major scandal in its day, yet it on another occasion Turrou claimed to received only scattered references in have fought on the Eastern Front. So the literature.4 As we shall see below, cavalier was his approach to the truth this was in large measure because FBI that it gave ammunition to his future director J. Edgar Hoover suppressed detractors. But it may also have been a key dimension of the story. The a trait that contributed to his ability to story needs to be revived because, as detect mendacity in criminal suspects. we shall also see, the scandal helped This much we know for sure. He to erode American neutrality, and arrived at New York’s Ellis Island German diplomats thought it ruined immigration processing depot the chances of Washington-Berlin on March 12, 1913. After casual harmony. employment and an unhappy love On the FBI’s official website there affair with a girl called Olga, he does is a reference to one of America’s appear to have returned to Europe to greatest detectives, Leon Turrou. The Leon G. Turrou. In 1938, he smashed a Nazi spy fight against Germany. Recovering website explains that in 1938, Turrou ring and launched a campaign for preparedness. from his war wound in a Paris was the bureau’s lead investigator Courtesy of Leon’s grandson Bob Turrou. hospital, he met his future wife, Teresa into a German spy ring. However, this Zakrewski. Eventually they had two official FBI narrative observes that his “background simply sons. did not prepare him for the nuances of an espionage case” In 1921, Turrou was in Russia with the American Relief and notes that he stood “accused of being an overzealous Mission, led by Herbert Hoover. By then the master of government agent motivated by profit and fame.”5 seven languages, he was a translator with a mind of his FBI records from the 1930s, accessed through the own. When corrupt communist soldiers held up U.S. grain Freedom of Information Act, tell a more rounded story. deliveries, he prodded his boss to confront the notorious Initially, Turrou was the apple of FBI director J. Edgar Soviet secret service chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky. According to Hoover’s eye. According to Hoover’s trusted confidant Turrou, it was a tense meeting, but he helped to persuade Passport September 2020 Page 45 Dzerzhinsky to release the grain. Dzerzhinsky issued an information on the computerization of code setting and order to his comrades “with not a trace of emotion on his breaking; the design of aircraft retraction devices on the deathmask face”: “The trains will move, and if you fail, the latest class of aircraft carriers; and blueprints of the new supreme punishment is waiting for you.”7 generation of American fighter planes. By 1921, J. Edgar Hoover wanted Turrou for his agency In the wider, wicked world that lay beyond the United (then called the Bureau of Investigation). Turrou could States, such peacetime espionage was standard practice. not join because he lacked the normative law degree and But it shocked Americans, who were not as accustomed to because of a postwar contraction in bureau hiring. However, having their country spied upon. There were, moreover, in the presidential election of 1929, he used his linguistic some nastier than usual aspects to spying by the Abwehr, skills to campaign on New York’s multi-ethnic East Side which was increasingly penetrated and influenced by Nazi for the ultimate victor, Herbert Hoover. His reward was an political officers and the fascist secret police, the Gestapo. appointment to the bureau as a special agent. There was an element of ruthlessness that one would not Though physically tough, Turrou was a cerebral person. have expected anywhere in peacetime: a plan to kidnap By the time he was assigned to the spy case in February and possibly murder a U.S. Army officer who knew about 1938, he had applied his forensic faculties to over 3,000 America’s East Coast defenses; the infiltration of Gestapo cases. He developed certain interrogative techniques, such agents into New York; the probable murder of two innocent as offering a cigarette at the right moment, or springing Californian women in an effort to pressure a San Francisco a witness on an off-guard suspect just when the suspect industrialist into cooperating with the Abwehr;9 and a was telling critical untruths. Building on an uncanny plan, discussed with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the ability to understand and exploit people’s personalities Abwehr, to set up a high-class brothel in Washington, DC, and weaknesses, he had a mesmerizing effect on those he to honeytrap military officers and government officials. questioned. Finally, although the German Criminals who knew that to word abwehr means “defense,” the talk to him meant signing their agency had an aggressive program own death warrants did so anyway. that went far beyond the mere An example occurred in the course theft of technology. The Abwehr of the Lindbergh kidnapping chased after data on American investigation. In March 1932, Bruno defense installations, not just along Richard Hauptmann climbed into the East Coast, but also in other the second-floor bedroom of Charles strategic areas such the Panama Lindbergh’s twenty-month-old son at Canal. It was interested in potential the Lindbergh home near Hopewell, bombing targets. It planned to New Jersey, abducted him, and sent use a member of its charm squad, a ransom note to Lindbergh. By the Kate Moog, to open an avenue to time the bureau caught up with strategic thinking in the White Hauptmann, the little boy was dead. House. Once Hitler had taken Fearing the death penalty, the care of Europe, his next target for murderer proved a hard nut to aggression was the United States. crack. Turrou sat with Hauptmann With his customary for hours. The killer knew he shrewdness and intuition, Turrou should not supply an example exposed most of the personnel Ambassador Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff bids goodbye to of his handwriting that could be American journalists he had befriended prior to his recall the of the Nazi spy ring in America compared with the handwriting Germany at the time of the Nazi spy trial in November 1938. and revealed their aims and on the ransom note. Yet Turrou Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-123456. methodology. He made mistakes. persuaded him, against his better Notably, he allowed one of his prize judgment, to write out passages informants to leave the United from the Wall Street Journal. Hauptmann went to the electric States. Ignatz Griebl was a New York gynecologist and chair in April 1936. prominent anti-Semite who doubled as a local coordinator The German intelligence operation exposed in 1938 was of Abwehr espionage. Moog was his mistress, and he often called the “Rumrich spy ring” after Guenther Gustave promoted the Washington brothel idea. Griebl told Turrou Maria Rumrich, a minor cog in the greater machine who he was afraid to return to Germany, since it was known just happened to be the first spy arrested. Turrou insisted he had talked to the FBI. But before he could appear in the in calling it instead the “Nazi spy ring,” and showed it to be courtroom, he suddenly left for his homeland, where the a much more serious affair. A section of American opinion Berlin regime rewarded him handsomely, expropriating a disagreed with him—the New York Times declared that Jewish vacation property in Bavaria and a Jewish medical in an age of transparency espionage was redundant, and practice in Vienna and gifting both to its valued spy.

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